Children May be Hazardous to Your Health (Dave Barry - LOL)

Maimi Herald ^

[nuconvert]

Children may be hazardous to your health

BY DAVE BARRY

(This classic Dave Barry column was originally published on Jan. 15, 1989.)

------

It's time for Alarming Medical News Items, the popular feature that can strike at any time without warning symptoms. For your protection, this column undergoes a rigorous fact-checking procedure under which, before we will print an item, it must first be delivered to us by the U.S. Postal Service. Don't bother to thank us: We aren't listening.

Speaking of which, our first alarming item concerns the recently discovered:

Ear Problem From Hell

We learned about this thanks to alert reader Diane Eicher, who sent in an American Medical Association newsletter containing an article about a North Carolina man who went to his doctor complaining of a ''full sensation'' in one ear, accompanied by a hearing loss. The doctor checked it out, and found that the man's ear canal was blocked by -- we are not making this up -- a plug of hardened Super Glue.

Now, some of you are wondering, ''How does a person with an IQ higher than pastry get Super Glue in his EAR and not know it?'' But you parents are no doubt nodding and saying: ``It would not surprise me to learn that this man has a 3-year-old son.''

And, of course, you're right. According to the AMA newsletter, the son ``squirted the glue into his father's left ear while the man was sleeping.''

Surgeons unclogged his ear, but as medical consumers we can prevent this kind of near-tragedy by remembering to:

1. Never keep 3-year-olds around the house.

2. If you do, never sleep.

Also: You older children should remember that Super Glue is a serious household repair substance and NOT a toy to be used in such pranks as applying it to the toilet seats in the Faculty Men's Room, taking care to first prepare the surface by wiping it clean of oil and dirt.

Our next item was brought to our attention by Debbie and Lindsey Mackey, who alerted us to an article in the British medical journal The Lancet with the following title: Exploding head syndrome.

Quite frankly, we were disappointed by this syndrome. We naturally assumed, from the title, that it would involve the actual explosion of a person's head, ideally Barry Manilow's in concert. But it turns out to be just this weenie syndrome where you wake up in the middle of the night having ''a violent sensation of explosion in the head.'' Big deal. We get that all the time, but you don't see us whining to The Lancet. You see us making a mental note to drink gin from smaller containers.

But not right now. Right now we want to tell you about the exciting new:

Advances in B.O. Measurement

We found out about this through alert readers James McNab and Shelley Owens, who sent us an article from the Journal of the American Society for Heating, Refrigeration and Air-conditioning Engineers written by a man named -- we are still not making this up -- ''P. Ole Fanger.'' Mr. Fanger, from Denmark, has done a LOT of research in the field of measuring exactly how much a given human tends to stink up a given room, and he has come up with a unit of air pollution called the ''olf'' (''from the Latin olfactus, or olfactory sense''). To quote the article: ``One olf is the emission rate of air pollutants (bioeffluents) from a standard person (Figure 1).''

We sincerely wish that we could show you Figure 1, which is a truly wonderful drawing of a standard person with dozens of little Smell Arrows shooting out of his body. Looking at this drawing reminded us of one of the highlights of our life, which is the time that we were with two friends, Randall and George, in a bar that was empty except for two women at the far end, and George, after maybe 17 Miller High Lifes, decided to Make a Move, which was pretty funny because George, even on those occasions when he has total control over his dentures, is not exactly Paul Newman, or even Mr. Ed.

But he went lunging over there, and, with all the subtlety of Hurricane Gilbert, attempted to strike up a conversation, which the two women were clearly not interested in. So they were quiet, and after a while George got quiet, and we were listening quietly, so the whole bar was very quiet when George had an unfortunate bodily event. It's the kind of event that can happen to anybody, except maybe Margaret Thatcher, but it rarely happens with the magnitude that it happened to George. You talk about Hurricane Gilbert. Of course, in those days we did not have modern measurement techniques, but we're sure that this event was completely off the scale on the Olf Meter. We're only sorry that we didn't get to see the two women sprint from the bar, because we were flat on the floor laughing so hard that we thought we were going to suffer a heart attack, which every American should know the Six Warning Signs of.

Today's medical tip: Never undergo any kind of major surgery without first making an appointment

[nuconvert]

Pong

[norraad]

"Do you like children?"

"Only if they're properly prepared".

W.C.Fields

[SandRat]

Remember; Insanity is hereditary --- you get it from your children.

Being an early elementary school teacher is the same as being a lab test rat in a biological agent lab.

Most adults used to be cool; until they had children.

[Ditter]

George had an "unfortunate bodily event". Oh dear I think I know George, he has them all the time.

[Chu Gary]

I think Dave Barry is just about the funniest person on the planet.

[Boxsford]

*smile* thanks!

[cjshapi]

Fun read ping.